The further adventures of Como

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, July 28, 2007

The Winn family's terrier mutt, Como, was feeling blue. Photo courtesy of the Winn family

The Winn family's terrier mutt, Como, was feeling blue. Photo courtesy of the Winn family

The further adventures of Como

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The symptoms were unmistakable. He wasn't eating. He slept around the clock. He walked, when he would walk at all, at a solemn trudge. His affect was flat and his mood listless. Como, our 41/2-year-old terrier mutt, was depressed.

It happened after we returned from a three-week vacation. Como had spent the time we were gone with his dog sitter, Marianna, whom he plainly and demonstratively adores. Then, to his apparent dismay, he was back home with the family that had plucked him from a shelter in 2003; fed, housed, walked, bathed, coddled and loved him loyally ever since; and in 2005, spent an alarming amount of money to have his pelvis surgically rebuilt after he was run over by an SUV. Not that he necessarily would have experienced his life with us from that point of view. But still ...

"He's depressed," I said the night we got home, staring into his bleak brown eyes as my wife, Sally, and our 16-year-old daughter, Phoebe, huddled around him on the bed. Sally left off stroking the dog's drooping head for a moment and shot me a sharp look. "That's not helping," she said. "Give him some time."

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Time, at the moment, was a fuzzy concept. We had just flown for 19 hours on two marathon flights, then persuaded our taxi driver to swing by Marianna's house in Daly City and pick up Como on the way home from the airport. So there we were, with bags still packed, a daunting heap of mail on the dining room table and all sense of normal existence gone, focused on a dog who seemed positively devastated to see us. It was, all in all, a grand welcome home.

Como slept that night on Phoebe's bed, as he always does. The next day he acted even bluer than he had the night before. He refused his breakfast and had to be all but dragged along on his morning walk. You could almost hear him sigh as he lifted his leg and then peered wearily back at us from his customary patch of ground near the school in our Inner Sunset neighborhood. "There," he seemed to be saying. "Are you satisfied?"

Sally and I convened for a Como seminar at the kitchen table, like a couple of consulting psychiatrists, while Phoebe sensibly went on sleeping off her jet lag upstairs. I wanted to Do Something. Take him to the beach for a really long walk. Shovel a lot of treats at him. Get him some doggy Zoloft. Take him back to Marianna's - a suggestion that made us both wince for a moment, since I think we were both secretly fretting that Como might actually prefer living with her and the convivial brood of dogs she boards and walks.

"Look," Sally said, "this is nothing new. It happened after the last time we left him there."

"I don't remember that," I said.

"He has trouble with transitions," she said.

That made us both pause, becauseit's more or less the same thing we've concluded about her over the years. Switching from work time to vacation time and vice versa always throws her a little. Sally and Como both have trouble with transitions. It's something - something else - that they have in common and I don't.

In the nearly four years that we've had Como, I've grown accustomed to the fact that he always has and always will prefer Sally and Phoebe to me. When either of them walks up the front steps and comes through the door, he greets them with a happily swinging tail and a dizzily circling romp around their feet. When I make an entrance, he remains in place, on his bed upstairs or in the main-floor study, greeting me with something ranging from passive tolerance to bemused recognition when I'm finally in his presence.

We knew when we adopted him that Como had had unspecified "issues" with men in his early life. Our early days together were horrific, with Como fleeing me - and on two woeful occasions, the house - whenever I neared him. The second flight ended with him pinned under a front tire of the SUV. So the fact that we get along as well as we do now, including an occasional unguarded moment when the dog might mysteriously bound onto my lap or transfer a few doggy kisses from Sally or Phoebe to me when I'm in the vicinity, should be counted as a worthy accomplishment in our canine family dynamic.

And yet, as Como's gloomy refusal to eat or perk up continued for another day, I couldn't help feeling freshly challenged. The challenge grew more specific when Phoebe left for camp and Sally, a few days later, flew to Spokane to attend a wedding. Como and I were on our own for the next three days. We took a meeting in the living room to discuss it.

"Look," I said, taking a crisp, businesslike approach, "I'm back at work. I know you've got things to do. Let's just get through this." To tell you the truth, I'm not entirely sure I said those things out loud to him. Unlike Sally, who keeps up a cheery audible patter with Como around the house and on their walks around the baseball fields in Golden Gate Park, I tend not to speak to him a whole lot. A lot of my dialogue with Como runs like subtitles from some foreign film through my brain. Sometimes it's a cryptic film noir. Sometimes it's a psychologically enigmatic family drama. Sometimes it's a French comedy, wispy and fey.

I know that's probably bad strategy. All lines of potential communication ought to be kept open. But the thing is, after years of mostly being ignored when I call him and having to sing long, leash-rattling arias to summon him for a walk, I've gotten a little discouraged about speaking up. Maybe that's just my wounded male pride. Maybe it's efficient common sense: The dog, after all, isn't going to join me in conversation. Or maybe I've been missing something all along.

When Phoebe came home from camp, Como rushed downstairs to greet her. She scooped him up in her arms and began babbling to him in that wonderfully musical and unspellable private language that flows out of her like water from a fountain whenever they reunite. He responded with a torrent of face licking and a madly wagging tail. Phoebe, who is keenly sensitive to my own muted relationship with our dog, looked over at me with an approving smile.

"You guys must have gotten on great," she said. "He's not depressed anymore."

"We did," I said brightly. "We had a great time together."

Como cranked his neck around to look at me when he heard my voice. What in the world, his big round eyes said to me, was I talking about?